Distributed chart repo display color configs?

[scottrigby]

Adding this convo here as opposed to https://github.com/helm/monocular because it mainly matters for the distributed hub.

From keybase chat, @unguiculus asked how we'd resolve duplicate charts that may be hosted by multiple repos in the helm charts hub. @prydonius said there are no constraints, you'll just see two separate listings.

Also the current UI may not distinguish one from another very well, since we don't display descriptions in list view. however we do display a configurable name for which repo it's from, as currently there are incubator and stable.

This issue is for discussion about whether we should use colors to more obviously disambiguate repos from one another at a glance? For example we now do that with incubator orange, stable blue, and in the kubeapps monocular instance you can additionally see bitnami and jfrog, etc are grey. I wonder if rather than hard-coding the above incubator/stable colors, we may want to support an optional color hex to the repos map in the monocular YAML config?

OTOH this could cause a turf war over company "owned" colors, and maybe confuse seeing one company's green as more ready to go than another company's red color ¯\(ツ)/¯.

Issue here mainly for discussion so we can decide what if anything to do about this.

[prydonius]

Thanks for writing this up, Scott! One issue with this is that the Monocular currently gets the name and URL of the repo from the arguments passed to chart-repo: https://github.com/helm/monocular/blob/master/cmd/chart-repo/sync.go#L28. Whilst we could add the colour as a third argument, it might be a bit strange to have that as an argument in the chart-repo command. We could instead have a way of passing arbitrary additional metadata to be included in the repo struct it stores in MongoDB.

This could cause a turf war over company "owned" colors, and maybe confuse seeing one company's green as more ready to go than another company's red color ¯(ツ)/¯.

This point does concern me a bit, it would be simpler to show all repos with the same colour (removing the current distinction between stable/incubator and non-stable/incubator) and avoid this entirely.

[scottrigby]

@prydonius I agree 💯

it would be simpler to show all repos with the same colour (removing the current distinction between stable/incubator and non-stable/incubator) and avoid this entirely

I suppose we should keep this issue open till that's done, or until someone offers a better idea 🙂

[prydonius]

So actually Monocular only makes a distinction between the incubator repo and other repos (marking it red instead of blue). This can be seen here: https://hub.helm.sh/. Kubeapps Hub is a little different here in that in distinguishes between stable, incubator and other repos.

I kind of like that the incubator repository is marked red, it might help point out that it is not recommended to be used?

[scottrigby]

Ah I see the grey is only on the earlier kubeapps implementation. Yes I agree, this seems important to keep. OK closing this, glad we have the discussion for reference in case we ever want to revisit or reference 👍